Why 2014 Was the Year of the "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

"You can tell me when it’s over, if the high was worth the pain," sings Taylor Swift in the video for "Blank Space", a song from her recent 1989. "Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane," she sings with mascara running down her face and wild eyes staring straight into the camera, a little smile on her lips as she draws out "insaaaane." "Blank Space" hinges on two main ideas: one, Swift has a public history of seemingly dysfunctional romantic relationships, which the media keeps tight tabs on. And two: that at the end of the day her songwriting pen holds a dangerous amount of power. A lyric like "I got a blank space baby, and I’ll write your name," asserts that Swift has the last word in guiding her narrative and, hell, if it consistently reads as "insane," she doesn’t care.

Taylor Swift is still, clearly, America’s Sweetheart; being so safely ensconced in pop’s upper echelons allows her to try out her version of the woefully unhinged ex-girlfriend figure. With "Blank Space" she owns her "nightmare dressed like a daydream" status proudly, without having to sweat what it might do to her rep or her Top 20 chart position. Yet, what’s more curious than "Blank Space" is its timing, and that Swift was just one of many female musicians this year who unabashedly inhabited the role of a mad woman in love (or lust).

Rising in the charts was Iggy Azalea’s "Black Widow", which called to mind Katy Perry’s 2013 clusterfuck of a revenge pop-narrative "Dark Horse". Like most of Azalea’s hits, the chorus is the earworm, with Rita Ora singing "I’m gonna love ya/ Until you hate me/ And I’m gonna show ya/ What’s really crazy." Delivered with a Kill Bill-themed video, the song is certainly the least nuanced retribution anthem of the year. But Azalea’s brand of getting back at her beau is to love him more; her spider web isn’t the weapon here, it’s her unrelenting desire and refusal to let go.

As overwrought as Azalea’s venomous, web-trapping, creepy-girl take might be, she certainly wasn’t the only one doing it. FKA twigs spent much of LP1 loving her man until it hurts, or worse. She blurs the lines between pleasure and torture on "Two Weeks" until you’re not sure which she’s singing about. "Pull out the incisor, give me two weeks, you won’t recognize her," she wails. "Feel your body closin’, I can rip it open." "In return, I’ll live forever loving you." What’s clear is that no matter what you do, FKA twigs will not leave you until you are hers.

All of these songs toy with the "crazy ex-girlfriend" trope: the clinging, vengeful lover who refuses to understand when it’s over. When she wants justice for her broken heart, some accounting for the lost love she’s due, it turns to obsession and pain becomes a constant. When women’s romantic behavior is constantly scrutinized as being inappropriate or not, the crazy girls say: fuck appropriate, these are my feelings without the bullshit. Like Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, the consummate pop culture "psycho bitch" of 2014, does not let the man have the last word; she will say when she’s done with him, not the other way around.

Break my legs so I won’t walk to you
Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you
Burn my skin so I can’t feel you
Stab my eyes so I can’t see

Granted, all break-up songs are bruises, but Van Etten’s is more a fresh, gaping wound; her delivery sounds like she’s sobbing as she works through this four-point list of bodily harm.

On Are We There, Van Etten details how she took her chances and was duped, for falling too deep in love. "He can break me with one hand to my head," she sings on "Break Me". "He can make me move into a city on my knees." Van Etten’s "crazy ex" is neither Taylor’s winking self-awareness or FKA twigs’ disciplined succubus. Van Etten fearlessly addresses how a break-up can be nothing short of devastation--it can turn you into someone else, into no one you recognize; into no one at all.

Lykke Li’s springtime feel-bad album, I Never Learn, at turns, describes love as a "cancer", "poison", and a "gunshot to the head"—and yet, she’s obsessed with getting it back. She is the wicked one here, putting herself on the cross in every song; the record is hard to listen to. In "Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone" she details an evil that seems to literally possess her, the devil’s hand on her heart. "There’s a war inside my core," she sings, "Go ahead, lay your head where it burns." The accompanying music video is a too-intimate spinning close-up of Li, hair in her face, eyes-rimmed red as she acknowledges the viewers gaze, welcoming you to view her at the end of her fraying tether, amid her crazed glory.

On Perfect Pussy’s record Say Yes to Love, Meredith Graves screams of the pain and darkness of a love lost, alternating between self-reflection and terrifying confrontation. "I’m kicking the wall, I’ll break through it before I go," she threatens on "Bells", "And leave a hole my shape in everything you know." The damage of a past relationship is conveyed throughout the record, but Graves knows exactly how much it’s done to her: it’s made her more fearless and louder than ever in the face of patriarchal notions of how a woman betrayed should present herself, like some Greek goddess of misandry. Graves will thrash on stage wildly, she will eat herself alive, and she will break through walls.

What Graves, twigs, Van Etten, and these others communicate in their songs is the sheer power of desire; not just in the pain of it, but the power of refusing to reign it in, the power of not turning it off, not being decent and sweet—not doing what the man wants. And so the man, he will hear her out and, maybe, depending on the song, he will pay. Culture always asks for more "strong women" but doesn’t want to accept that part of being a strong woman, of just being human, is feeling pain. And when this pain is depicted in such a deeply vulnerable way, blood and guts spilled, demanding listeners to not just hear but feel too, you realize how normal "crazy" might actually be.

Songs like these are nothing short of empowering. These artists have taken this sexist trope and pushed it back in our faces, turning their madness into pop art. Because how easy is it really for a woman to be labeled "crazy"? A text sent too soon, a voice raised too loudly, an opinion spoken too clearly. Reclaiming that title of the "crazy ex" says "I will show you insane," and ups the ante some more.

If getting over your boyfriend instantly was last year’s musical power move, now, in 2014, it’s just to love him—forever.